Simha Arom

Simha Arom (born 1930 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a French-Israeli ethnomusicologist who is recognized as a world expert on the music of central Africa, especially that of the Central African Republic. His books include African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (1991) ISBN 0-521-24160-X. He also made some historical field recordings of the Aka Pygmy music. He is an Emeritus Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), a founding member of the French Ethnomusicological Society, the French Society for Musical Analysis, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. He is also a member of the French Musicological Society and of the Board of Directors of the Universe of Music project (UNESCO). In 2008 he received the Fumio Koizumi Prize for ethnomusicology. He deposited his collection of recordings at the sound library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2011.